I’ve thought for the last year this is an urgent question which I’ve yet to see an adequate answer to. What is it about the cultural machinery of platform capitalism which facilitates the coalescence of incredibly heterogeneous elements (wellness culture, anti-globalisation, QANon, anti-lockdown, anti-pharma, ‘save the children’ etc) into the ‘truth community’? Was this always going to happen once media infrastructure increased the likelihood of overlapping groups with a common meta-paranoia meeting each other? Is it the grifters and influencers driving this process or are they an epiphenomenon of the media infrastructures? Is there something more going on here?
(In Naomi Klein’s new book she suggests what unites these aspects is a common rebellion against collectivity and interdependency, asserting the sovereignty of the individual. Perhaps this is the mirror image of what I describe above as a ‘meta-paranoia’?)
Mark Carrigan 